December 2011

A Nation of Neros

Submitted by ldweeks on Tue, 12/13/2011 - 14:28

Young American men today are a mixed bag. Speaking generally, our young men are entirely given over to the lusts of their flesh. Pornography is ubiquitous. And yet, these same men play video games and watch movies and read books that contain extraordinally graphic depictions of violence and mayhem. The protagonists in these works are men (or women) who are to be feared indeed. Not willing to discipline their own bodies for some higher purpose, our men live vicariously through these characters who have.

I thought about our young men today when I came across this quote from book 5, section 19 of Augustine's City of God:

Codecademy

Submitted by ldweeks on Sat, 12/10/2011 - 20:10

This website looks very promising: http://www.codecademy.com/. It doesn't have very many courses listed on it right now, but it looks like they're doing a bang-up job.

It seems very similar to the one computer science class I took when I attended Indiana University. We used Scheme, and nearly all of the course work was computer automated. Every program we wrote was submitted and graded online. The professors were fantastic about responding over email, so feeback was often immediate. It was a great way to learn a new programming language.